National Poetry Month Day 1: Su Hwang

Celebrate National Poetry Month with new poems daily, featuring a variety of voices and perspectives in contemporary poetry.

In a Museum of Deadly Sins

Begin: An apple. 
Experts agree that it starts with an apple.

∞
Arlene Kim

Must never peer away from the gluttony 
of art: busts of greedy men, marbled 

torsos, still lifes, women made to be 
bogles of lust. Dioramas of what bodies 

cannot contain, crypts of maggoted pride; 
a certain ilk of fantasy. Yet the opulence 

of empire & envy dawdles, sculpted to 
hoard & ogle like pigeons warring before 

frost. This storied country in a city 
in a country seethes fluxes of riches,

priceless amulets & pillaged treasures 
wainscoting plush galleries: an immaculate 

estate. Is this a pious anthology? O Father, 
we have sinned; to have & to hold, idle

& sloth at the expense of paupers. Our
charismatic tour guide named Massimo, 

mayor of these bedazzled halls, shares a 
fact that throws me into a tizzy: apple 

& evil, in Italian, respectively, are spelled 
mela & male. In Latin, malum, means both

evil & apple. Holy shit. I gesture at my head 
somersaulting. This tidbit unearths what 

may be our most original fraud, lost or
scythed in translation over centuries of 

exodus, in the midst of combat, migration 
& the sheer tenacity of dynasties. Doesn’t 

proper transmission between fact & fiction
act as arbiter of evolving culture? Still, we 

take the rumors of monks pinched by dim 
candlelight that Eve emerged from the rib 

of Adam, then became the source of iniquity
at face value. For what it’s worth, I refute 

this baseless conclusion as I, too, gawk at 
the ceiling of international repute among 

throngs of other visitors, marveling at the 
arduous labor of one prone Michelangelo

(also erroneous, he painted on his feet),
an undisputed masterpiece of propaganda 

in the zeitgeist of robed pagan conceits. A
cerulean graphic novel to evoke the awe 

of divinity, stuffing coffers & fear to the 
masses. Straight up gospel: I arose from 

the deepest cut of my mother’s abdomen, 
a squealing entity, red & foreign, expelled 

from her nuclear nursery, just as every 
living being is borne from some kind of

bosom. In me, fury balloons, at the mess 
of our mortal folly, as I wander the naves 

prettied by barrel vaults & all that glitters,
chimeras of cardinals, parishes & rosaries 

that haunt the edges. God does not reside 
in these vicinities. In search of the sacred, 

I ramble instead to an apse of redwoods & 
evergreens, lie on the justice of moss, say 

a prayer to the wind, sun, our throbbing 
vibrations, among the floss of every web 

& cambered glint at the altar of pinecones.

***